HyTrust Acquires HighCloud Security!

Last year I had a very nice conversation with Eric Chiu about everything in the datacenter moving into software and the risky things around that move, today HyTrust Inc., the Cloud Security Automation Company, announced that it has acquired HighCloud Security, a leader in cloud encryption and key management software. By combining HyTrust’s powerful administrative visibility and control with HighCloud’s strengths in encryption and key management, the acquisition offers customers of both companies an unprecedented level of flexibility in addressing security, compliance and data privacy requirements in all cloud environments—private, public and hybrid.

The combined offering from HyTrust and HighCloud enables ‘cloaked’ private, hybrid and public clouds and helps address three of the primary security concerns in cloud environments. These are:
• The broad level of access available to privileged users with malicious intent (or those who acquire their credentials)
• Breaches and other data center disasters caused not by criminal intent but through human error or misconfiguration
• Challenges involved in maintaining the security and privacy of the data itself

While these issues don’t always get the attention they deserve, security executives are certainly aware of the concerns that stem from in-house misuse. A recent report1 from Forrester Research notes that insiders rather than extraneous criminal elements were the top source of breaches in the past 12 months, and 36% of them were caused not by malfeasance but by inadvertent misuse of data by employees.

In this environment, HyTrust and HighCloud Security offer unique and complementary strengths to the market.

Eric Chiu, president and founder of HyTrust, said: “HyTrust represents the control point for cloud management, providing automated policy-based security for private cloud environments that can enable both trusted hybrid clouds and ‘cloaked’ public clouds. HighCloud encryption, meanwhile, can be deployed in private, hybrid and public clouds, ensuring data security and privacy as organizations migrate between these environments.”

Cloud computing, and the security concerns that go with it, remain a top priority for most organizations. According to technology analyst firm Gartner Inc., nearly half of large enterprises have deployed a private cloud service and three-fourths expect to have hybrid cloud deployments by 2015.2 A full 80% of organizations intend to use cloud services in some form within the next year, while 60% plan to increase their investment in the next two to five years.3

Chiu continued: “The service also enables a unique level of ‘walk-way’ freedom by making it possible to securely change cloud providers or decommission from the cloud without having to worry about data being left behind. This also makes it easier for corporations to achieve compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and PCI.”

While the technologies can already be used together, the HighCloud solution will in the future be integrated into HyTrust to more tightly bind administrative controls with data security in cloud environments, making encryption and key management invisible to the end user. HighCloud’s engineering team will join HyTrust, continuing to provide support and maintenance to existing customers, and moving forward with the development of HighCloud’s technology roadmap.

“HighCloud and HyTrust have had many ties over the years and solve complementary problems for customers,” said Bill Hackenberger, co-founder, president and CEO of HighCloud Security. “Together, HyTrust and HighCloud give enterprises unprecedented ability to address security, compliance and data privacy requirements for all cloud environments, private, hybrid and public.”

With this move, HyTrust adds HighCloud Security’s strong data encryption and key management to its administrative visibility and control, enabling end-to-end security for cloud environments.
Together, the combined solution will offer significant benefits to enterprises and cloud service providers, including:
• Easier compliance with HIPAA, PCI and other privacy regulations
• Controlling and alerting against actions by rogue administrators, or those who gain their credentials
• Preventing catastrophic datacenter failures caused by administrative error
• Protection against data theft or accidental exposure in the public, private or hybrid cloud
• Enabling secure migration to, from and between different cloud environments

While we all move more and more to the Software Defined Data Center it is good to have controls in place like the two man rule and have software who shields sensitive data in the hybrid or even public cloud. I support the HyTrust vision of enabling automated, policy-based security for the cloud to prevent breaches and data center disasters. Data Centers can now completely be provisioned but also destroyed with the click of a mouse button!!

If you wanna know more about HyTrust and their vision and why they acquired HighCloud Security there is a live webinar on November 20th at 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific

Edwin Weijdema

Edwin Weijdema is a Solutions Architect at Veeam for the Benelux & Nordics region and has over 20 years of experience designing, implementing, and managing data center technologies for large companies. His areas of expertise include virtualization, networking, and storage solutions. He knows what it takes to add business value to partners and customers. He is a veteran vExpert, Cisco Champion 2015 and holds several other certifications.